This weekend our lovely neighbors gave us a bag of hot peppers. They warned us that the peppers are REALLY hot and so I decided to make hot pepper jelly with them to cool them off a bit. The recipe I followed for Hot Pepper and Peach Jelly suggested wearing gloves while cutting the peppers if you have sensitive skin. My skin isn't especially sensitive so I cut them in the nude...well my hands were nude anyway. I was even scraping the seeds out with my nails...no big deal!
After the peppers were sufficiently chopped, I had to run to the store to buy sugar and pectin (main jelly ingredients) and I noticed that my lips were sort of burning where I had touched them to put on lipgloss, but it wasn't anything to cry about so I didn't think too much of it.
Then, when I was boiling the soon-to-be jelly, and the steam was engulfing my hands as I stirred the mixture, I cried out in pain, "Ouch, I'm in pain" or maybe it was more of a curseword, but you get the idea.
For the next 12 hours, I was in agony. I tried soaking my hands multiple times in half and half, I tried olive oil, salt, aloe vera with lidocaine, lots of soap and water (the water burns the worst), lotion, 2 tablespoons of hard butter, and at a moment of sheer desperation, I even shoved my fingers into a half of a watermelon...it was cooling for a moment but the burning quickly returned.
At about 10:30 pm, I took a Tylenol PM, thinking that maybe I could just sleep through the horrifying pain. It made me really sleepy, but not sleepy enough to set my hands on anything or to fall asleep. It did make me sleepy enough to almost fall asleep standing up with my hands in half and half, but once I took them out, the burning resumed and I was awake yet again. At about 11 pm, I drove to Walgreens to get some burn cream thinking that was my only option for relief (sounds like a hemorroid ad) and so I bought the Emergency Burn Relief cream and followed the directions to apply a thick layer and leave on for 30 minutes. For 30 minutes I paced around my darkened living room crying my eyes out. The pacing brought the pain from a 10 to an 8, probably because it slightly distracted me but it STILL REALLY HURT. After 30 minutes, I realized it was doing nothing and actually made it burn more, so I washed it off...which also really hurts because the water intensifies the burning.
THE ONLY THING THAT WORKED: I filled a bag with ice cubes and would take an ice cube, rub it on my hands and keep my hands on the side of the bed so they didn't have to touch anything and kept most of the melting ice cubes from soaking my blanket. I would sleep for 5-10 minutes until the ice cube either melted or fell out of my hands and then I'd wake up and start the process again. Ice melts pretty quickly so I had about 6 or 7 trips to the kitchen to refill my ice bag.
Finally at about 9:30 am (after I had already let my boss know I'd be late to work because I had gotten about 1.5 hours of sleep) the pain finally was gone and I had gotten an additional 2 hours of sleep from 7:30-9:30 am.
Moral of the story?: WEAR FRIGGIN GLOVES.
No comments:
Post a Comment